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5 - Prostitution, Polyandry or Rape? On the Ambiguity of European Sources for the West African Coast, 1660–1860

from Part Two - Vulnerability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2019

Adam Jones
Affiliation:
University of Leipzig.
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Summary

Early European travellers’ accounts mention prostitution on various parts of the West African coast, mostly with Europeans as the clients. However, a few also describe something different: an institution providing sexual services exclusively for African men, located on the coast of what is now south-western Ghana. In this chapter, using comparative material as well as source criticism, I examine what the evidence tells us about these women. Does it warrant using the term ‘prostitution’? Did the women exercise any agency in the services they offered? Or should we rather view their sexual exploitation as evidence of girls’ and women's extreme vulnerability, perhaps even justifying the term ‘rape’?

The region is inhabited by speakers of four dialects of western Akan: Esuma, Nzima, Evalue and Ahanta. Little is known about the history of this area before 1800, because in commercial terms it had less to offer outsiders than the central or eastern Gold Coast, even though it did play a role in the gold trade. It was forested, politically decentralised and, in relation to areas further east, sparsely inhabited.

The Sources

Two early Dutch sources describe the initiation of women referred to as ‘whores’. Using an unidentified source probably relating to the early 1660s, the geographer Olfert Dapper wrote in 1668:

Although the Blacks along the coast and in the interior are allowed to marry as many wives as they can maintain, Atzin [= Axim] and all the surrounding areas as far as the Quaqua Coast have the custom that every village maintains two or three whores, called abrakrees. These whores are appointed and initiated into their status as whores by the village authorities in the presence of a large crowd of people in the following manner. First, these whores, who are purchased slaves, display themselves on a straw mat with all kinds of absurd gestures. Then the oldest among them takes a young hen, cuts off its beak and lets several drops of its blood drop on her head, shoulders and arms. Meanwhile they swear in an awful manner that they shall die if they do not accept as lovers every man as their wooer for three or four kakraven, which are [the equivalent of] twelve or sixteen pennies, even if the man visiting them is very rich; indeed they do not even exclude their own blood relations …

Type
Chapter
Information
African Women in the Atlantic World
Property, Vulnerability & Mobility, 1660–1880
, pp. 89 - 108
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2019

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